This invention relates to a drier for drying lengths or webs of sheet material such as textiles and the like.
More particularly, this invention relates to a drier for moving and drying textiles etc., wherein the lengths of material sequentially pass through several identical drying zones, or several identical pairs of drying zones in counter type driers, during the drying treatment implemented by fresh air, circulating air and exhaust air.
It is known that in accordance with the drying curve, most of the water is evaporated from a textile material at the beginning of drying with decreasing evaporation in the following drying sections. Therefore, in conventional driers, very moist exhaust air is evacuated in the first drying zones, and air with low humidity is evacuated from the latter zones. This process is uneconomical due to the waste of energy.
Due to high energy costs, it is necessary that all processes involved in textile finishing be optimized to minimize energy consumption. It is therefore uneconomical to follow the present method of first handling the treating process with high energy consumption in order to recover part of the energy by means of energy recovery systems.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a drier using treatment procedures which are optimized with respect to energy consumption, and which require a minimum amount of energy for the treating procedure.